Diamond Annual Review 2023/24

79 D I A M O N D L I G H T S O U R C E A N N U A L R E V I E W 2 0 2 3 / 2 4 Throughout the year, Diamond has also once again welcomed undergraduate and postgraduate students from across the UK and beyond for in person visits to Diamond to introduce them to the facility and the possibilities we offer both as a user and career pathways.We offered a range of talks and training and welcomed 746 students for this type of visit. In March 2024 Diamond signed a new five-year agreement with the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), which aims to enhance the student experience by bringing the two organisations closer together to allow students to learn about each other’s scientific portfolio. This Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) will drive a closer collaboration through the formation of a Steering Committee that will help shape curriculum content to meet students’ needs. This agreement is going to create great opportunities for new science and for both organisations’ scientists and students. A key objective is to facilitate collaboration around student engagement activities, including using our respective expertise to accomplish valuable scientific training for each other’s student cohorts. Professor Gianluigi Botton, CEO, Diamond Light Source Scientific workshops and conferences Diamond organises a broad portfolio of scientific and technical workshops, training courses and conferences tailored towards the needs of our staff and user communities. Last year, we hosted 43 events and engaged with 3,513 scientists and engineers from all over the globe. In August 2023, Diamond had a unique presence at the IUCr conference in Melbourne, Australia, a keystone conference for the Crystallography community, held once every three years. Focussing on science networking, technique development, and connecting light sources and research infrastructures around the world, the team help over 26 scientists at Diamond to share their outputs and research. Diamond also held a series of science engagement activities at the conference, centred at an interactive booth. This event had over 1,700 attendees and brought awareness of Diamond to a global audience. The Diamond stand at IUCr inMelbourne was delivered to an excellent standard. As such, it became a social hub of conversation, collaboration and knowledge exchange. It was central to bringing together both potential users and other facility collaborators with our staff participating fromDiamond, and it is largely responsible for the start of a number of practical collaborations between Diamond staffmembers and our international colleagues. The entire conference was a great success for Diamond, and the Diamond stand was a key part of the teamachievement. Adrian Mancuso, Physical Science Director and IUCr In December 2023, we hosted the 7th edition of our Early Career Scientists Symposium, which continued its astounding success in terms of attendance and impressive speakers. This event, focussed on developing careers in synchrotron science, featured 23 talks from a diverse and eminent group of speakers. This year, 2023 Nobel Laureate in Medicine, Drew Weissman, Chief Editor at Nature Physics David Abergel, and Theoretical physicist, author and broadcaster Prof. Jim Al-Khalili joined the speaker alumnus. The symposium was by far the most popular event of the last 12 months and brought together over 750 junior scientists looking for inspiration to shape their future careers. In March 2024 Diamond’s first ever Synchrotron Electrochemistry Workshop took place in Oxford. The event was born from discussions across two of science groups (Structures and Surfaces and Spectroscopy) to showcase the opportunities that exist across these disciplines at Diamond. Collaborative teamwork resulted in an inaugural event that stimulated a new user community to start discussing proposals and how Diamond could enable their research. Engaging with the media Diamond’s science and facility continued to inspire the public, and the media with a range of stories. Samples from the asteroid Bennu, brought back to Earth as part of NASA’s Osiris-Rex mission, were brought by a research team from the Natural History Musem, and a number of filming events took place, with coverage expected later in the year. Project M was a large-scale citizen-science project, started at Diamond in 2017. Using the I11 beamline a research team partnered with over 1000 student scientists from 110 schools around the UK to prepare and analyse samples, inspiring a generation of future innovators. A paper on this work was published in the journal CrystEngComm, and The Guardian and Observer newspapers covered the impressive impact on the work done at Diamond. A research team from the University of Kentucky has returned to Diamond on several occasions to study scrolls from Herculaneum, in hopes to use the data, and AI programming to help decipher what’s inside these precious samples without damaging them. The captivating story was filmed and shared on ITV news, with a number of other pieces looking at the story in more detail. Diamond also launched a new video series, Leading Lights, which showcased intimate video portraits of Diamond users, discussing how their research and their science stories, helped to define who they were as a person – and how their knowledge can change the world. The eight-part series launched on YouTube over the Christmas holidays, and highlighted work done at over on-third of Diamond’s beamlines and facilities.